500px Review & An Awesome Giveaway!

We would like to introduce you to a cool new photo sharing service called 500px and let you know how you can win one of 10 upgraded accounts worth $50 each! Read on for details…

What is 500px?

500px is a photo sharing service that has really exploded in popularity recently. Part of the reason for this is the freakishly high standard of photographs that can be found in the galleries! This is a side-effect of 500px being a breath of fresh air that has lured many of the web’s best photographers away from more established alternatives.

The site is free to join and allows you to upload up to 20 photos per week. It encourages you to share only your best shots. The overall site design is attractive and shows off the pictures beautifully (you can see ours here: Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas). There is a good community of people already on 500px and I have been impressed with the number of views and comments my photos have been receiving.

The site has a decent ranking system that gives each photograph a score between 0 and 100. It is rather addictive because you can watch your score climb with every “like”! If a picture’s score is high enough, it will get promoted to the Popular page, resulting in a ton of exposure and comments.

However, for me the best thing about 500px is the responsive team of people who are working tirelessly to improve the site (I have noticed a few incremental improvements even in the short time that I have been using it). If you contact them for any reason you will usually get a rapid response.

Awesome Accounts

Upgrading to an Awesome account will cost you $50 and gives you a couple of handy benefits:

You can upload an unlimited number of photos without the weekly limit.

You receive a premium portfolio… this is basically a standalone website that displays the photos you have uploaded to 500px. There are several very attractive portfolio designs to choose from. What’s cool is you can set a custom domain name, making this a great way to build your own website if you don’t already have one. You can see our portfolio here: http://wildlife.500px.com/

Giveaway: Win One of 10 Awesome Accounts!

The kind people over at 500px have generously donated $500 worth of Awesome accounts for us to give away to you, our blog subscribers and facebook fans!

All you have to do to become eligible for this draw is complete two simple steps:

The deadline is 11:59pm (GMT) on Saturday (25th June). After the deadline we will go through our list of followers and select 10 accounts at random to receive a free 1-year Awesome account worth $50!

Once you’ve got your new 500px account and uploaded a few photos, feel free to share a link to it in the comments below. We look forward to seeing your shots!

Update: The giveaway is now over! Congratulations to the following users who have received 1 year of awesomeness: Beyondthelimitsphotography, mkshft, Bobbyjojo, nigelivy, KevinXolio, richmedia, shells_moments, RupeshJadhav, ColinCampbell, azmi5245. A big thank you to everyone who took part! If you were not a winner but still want an Awesome account, you can get 20% off using the promo code “friends”!

We will be running more giveaways in the future so make sure you sign up to our newsletter so that we can keep you informed, you can subscribe by email or via RSS